I was able to finish shooting all of the pictures for the stop motion movie yesterday! Luckily it warmed up during the morning and early afternoon so that the snow was almost completely gone by the time we were able to go outside, so hopefully I’ll be done with the post-production in a few days and the movie will be made public to the world!

I have been trying to do some filming for our army figure movie, but it just hasn’t worked out! First it rained, then we left for two days, and now it’s snowing! I’m trying to do as much of the post-production as I can (although it’s kind of hard to do visual effects for a scene that you haven’t shot yet). I’ll try to keep you posted on any further developments.

That’s right! 4404 Army Men (I only took a picture of 6 and then multiplied them). We are planning on doing a stop motion Army Figure video, and since we don’t happen to own such a huge number of Army Men I decided to go the cheapskate’s route and just duplicate them on the computer.
You can click on the picture to get a full screen view of the massive army.

Here is the video of a “lecture” that I gave to some of the boys at our church,I have had the video clips put together for about 2 weeks but I was just able to find the right time record it this morning(it’s kind of hard to record audio around our house because whenever it’s quiet (early morning,late night) it usually needs to stay quiet and whenever it doesn’t need to stay quiet there isn’t usually a solid 5-10 minutes of total and complete silence.)The movie making lesson was the longest “speech”(at about 10 minutes) that I had ever given (although having movies to show helped cut down my actual speaking time). The movie version isn’t near as long(less than 5 minutes)
because I did most of the talking in my lesson after I showed the movies, where here I do a lot of the talking during the movies, I also had a question and answer time afterward. The movie version was kind of crazy at times because I put together the movie clips before I recorded the audio, so sometimes I was kind of rushed. I hope you learn something about how we make our movies!
So here it is:

Today I uploaded another blender simulation, I was able to use the particle systems physics to render the balls (instead of having to render 1000 Softbody UV spheres separately) but even still I averaged about 2-3 minutes of render time for each frame. (I tried to render 5000 Balls at once but our computer kept crashing around frame 55, so I had to settle with only 1000 balls. =(
Enjoy!

Here is a compilation of some particle simulations that I did in Blender, I goofed around with using different types of particles instead of just the “halo” default, and I think it turned out nicely. Although I rendered the clips in 1080p the editing program that I use wouldn’t let me export any video files with a resolution greater than 480×720. So here they are: (The clip of the cube falling apart isn’t a true particle animation, but I used the “explode” modifier to parent the vertices of the cube to the separate particles, so in a way it is).